Restoring Your I-sight: How the Soul Unites the Senses in Healthy Seeing

Restoring Your I-sight: How the Soul Unites the Senses in Healthy Seeing

Restoring Your I-sight: How the Soul Unites the Senses in Healthy Seeing

May 1, 2009 By davidjones

Figure 1 – The sense of colour in vision. The spectrum in the rainbow.By DOUG MARSH

Much of medical science deals strictly with the body, while denying – or at least largely relegating to the background – our inner soul essence. This view is particularly prevalent in conventional vision treatment where eyesight is considered to be a camera-like process which creates an image that’s either in or out of focus. Such a one-tiered approach results in a lopsided notion of what is normal. Eyeglasses are so commonplace in our culture, they’re considered virtually natural extensions of the human anatomy. People seeing clearly with their own eyes are becoming a rare breed.

In more recent years, the quest for a novel approach to vision treatment took a technological leap with the advent of refractive eye surgery, also known as laser eye surgery, or by the acronym of LASIK, a popular procedure. In a way, this technology is turning full circle back to Mother Nature’s design, touting 20/20 vision (or very close to it) with a natural appearance and no fuss. According to the industry, these purported outcomes involve minimal risk and have high patient satisfaction rates.

However, more cases of patients with negative outcomes – ranging in scale from continual annoying symptoms to disabling complications and worsening eyesight – are coming to the forefront in the media and on the Internet. Tragically, a few cases have ended in suicides.The furore prompted the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) last year to publicly hear statements from affected patients. The FDA panel reiterated that refractive eye surgery, like any surgery, has its risks but has an excellent overall track record. Nevertheless, to bolster the safeguards, they recommended enhanced patient screening methods and further post-operative studies by the industry. (Interestingly, the eye doctor who chaired the FDA panel wears glasses. Although she regularly performs refractive eye surgery, she chooses not to undergo the procedure herself, citing one of the reasons as an aversion to any level of risk.)

Lost amid the allure and debates over technological treatments is an obscure alternative called natural vision improvement (NVI). As the name implies, it’s a more nature-centred approach, a holistic mind-body method that seeks to reverse an imbalance induced by a response to stress. It introduces a psychological component, counter to most prevailing notions that the physical eyes somehow just “go bad” with no hope of improving. For those attuned to esoteric traditions – or the “Perennial Philosophy” as writer Aldous Huxley put it – the psyche is simply a secular name for the soul.